Reading the Silent Sense
- Editorial Team
- 20 hours ago
- 6 min read
Written by the Editorial Team.
Philosophy ranked smell the lowest of the senses and science largely ignored it for a century. The reassessment now underway says something worth hearing about what we have been trained to value.
There is a question worth asking at the end of a collection like this one. Why did it take so long for anyone to take smell seriously?
The answer is not that the evidence was missing. It is that smell sat on the wrong side of a long-standing hierarchy, and the hierarchy was more about what a culture admires than about how a body works.
That history is worth knowing, because the same instinct that dismissed smell tends to dismiss a good deal else.
A sense that resists language was always going to be undervalued by a culture that trusts what it can articulate.
The long demotion
Western thought placed sight and hearing at the top of the sensory order for centuries, treating them as the senses of reason and civilisation. Smell was grouped with taste and touch as bodily, immediate and closer to the animal.
Kant regarded it as the least rewarding of the senses. Darwin considered it of little use to modern humans. Freud connected the upright posture and the retreat of smell to the development of civilisation itself, with the implication that being less olfactory was a mark of progress.
The historian Alain Corbin traced how this hierarchy played out socially in The Foul and the Fragrant, showing how attitudes to smell mapped onto class and status in ways that had very little to do with biology. Smell was consistently associated with what a society wished to distance itself from.
What the science missed as a result
The consequence for research was substantial. Olfaction was studied far less than vision or hearing, and the working assumption held that human smell was feeble compared with other animals. The frequently repeated claim that humans can distinguish only around ten thousand odours turned out to trace back to a rough theoretical estimate from the 1920s rather than any experiment.
That figure was overturned. Later work suggested the true number is vastly higher, and while the exact estimate remains debated, the direction of the correction is not. Human olfactory ability had been underrated for decades on the basis of an assumption nobody had properly tested.
Ann-Sophie Barwich, a philosopher and cognitive scientist who works on olfaction, examined this history in Smellosophy, arguing that the neglect of smell distorted the wider science of perception. Much of what we believe about how the brain processes the world was built on the study of vision, and smell works differently enough to complicate those conclusions.
The language problem
Part of the difficulty is genuinely practical. English has almost no vocabulary for smell. We describe odours by their sources or by borrowing from taste: it smells like lemon, it smells sweet. Colour has hundreds of terms. Smell has almost none.
This is not universal. Several languages, particularly among communities in Southeast Asia, have dedicated abstract smell vocabularies, and speakers of those languages identify odours with markedly greater accuracy and agreement than English speakers do. The limitation is cultural rather than neurological.
Harold McGee took on the vocabulary problem directly in Nose Dive, working through the chemistry of the smells of the world and giving them names and explanations.
Jude Stewart approached the same territory from the essayist's side in Revelations in Air. Both books make the same underlying point: attention to smell can be developed, and the poverty of our descriptions reflects a lack of practice rather than a lack of capacity.
What is being recovered
The reassessment has been driven partly by evidence and partly by event. The pandemic removed the sense of smell from a very large number of people at once, and the resulting accounts made something clear that research had struggled to convey. People who lost it described food becoming meaningless, intimacy feeling flattened, and a peculiar detachment from their own lives.
That testimony aligned with what the research had been finding. Smell is bound to emotion at the level of brain structure, connected to memory more directly than any other sense, and linked to mood in ways that only become visible when it is gone.
A sense that determines whether food is a pleasure, whether a place feels like home, and whether a person smells like someone you love is not a minor sense. It was simply a sense that never made a case for itself in the language available.
Why this belongs in lifestyle medicine
Lifestyle medicine concerns itself with the ordinary, repeated conditions of a life: what is eaten, how much movement happens, how sleep goes, what the environment is like, who is nearby. Smell runs through all of it, largely unregistered.
It shapes appetite and therefore nutrition. It signals safety and threat. It regulates mood in small increments across a day. It is entangled with memory and, through memory, with the sense of being a continuous person. These are not peripheral matters.
Taking it seriously does not require overstating it. The effects documented in this collection are mostly modest, and the field is young. What it requires is not dismissing a channel into the emotional brain simply because it is difficult to describe.
The wider habit
There is a pattern here that extends past smell. The things that get studied, funded and respected tend to be the things that can be measured cleanly and discussed in confident language. The things that resist articulation get treated as soft, and their neglect gets mistaken for evidence of unimportance.
Women over forty will recognise the shape of this. Symptoms difficult to quantify, experiences hard to name, forms of knowing that carry no vocabulary and are therefore assumed to carry no weight. Smell was demoted for reasons that had very little to do with what it does.
Which is a reasonable argument for paying attention to what is quietly working on you, whether or not there are words for it.
A sense worth noticing
The practical residue of all this is small and available. Notice what a room smells like when you enter it. Notice which smells return you to somewhere, and let that happen without hurrying. Cook with things that have a smell. Keep the sense in use.
Smell has been doing its work throughout, without instruction and without acknowledgement, shaping how a day feels from underneath. Turning some attention back toward it is a modest correction, and an overdue one.
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What's next
Start with 8 Ways Scent Shapes Mood, Memory and Focus, the foundation piece on how scent reaches the emotional brain.
Then explore our Aromachology collection for more evidence-based perspectives on scent and state.
For the studies behind this series, browse our Lifestyle Medicine Research Hub, where each study is summarised in plain language.
FAQ
Why was smell historically considered the lowest sense?
Western thought placed sight and hearing at the top as the senses of reason, grouping smell with taste and touch as bodily and closer to the animal. Kant, Darwin and Freud all reflected this view, and it shaped how little the sense was studied.
Practical step: notice how often a sense is judged by cultural status rather than by what it does.
Can humans really only detect around ten thousand odours?
That figure traces back to a rough theoretical estimate from the 1920s rather than any experiment, and later research indicated the true capacity is vastly greater. The precise number remains debated, and the direction of the correction is well accepted.
Practical step: treat long-repeated claims about human limitation with appropriate scepticism.
Why is it so hard to describe smells?
English has almost no abstract vocabulary for smell, so we describe odours by their source or borrow from taste. Some languages have dedicated smell vocabularies, and their speakers identify odours with markedly greater accuracy, which suggests the limitation is cultural rather than neurological.
Practical step: try naming a smell without referring to its source, as practice develops the ability.
Which books are worth reading on this?
Harold McGee's Nose Dive works through the chemistry of the smells of the world. Ann-Sophie Barwich's Smellosophy examines the science and its neglect. Jude Stewart's Revelations in Air approaches it as an essayist, and Rachel Herz's The Scent of Desire covers scent and emotion.
Practical step: start with whichever suits your appetite for chemistry, philosophy or essay.
Did the pandemic change how smell is understood?
It contributed significantly. Large numbers of people losing the sense at once produced widespread accounts of food becoming meaningless and daily life feeling flattened, which aligned with what research had been finding about the links between smell, emotion and memory.
Practical step: take reports of smell loss seriously, including your own.
Why does smell belong in lifestyle medicine?
It shapes appetite and nutrition, signals safety, regulates mood across a day, and is entangled with memory and the sense of continuity. These are the ordinary repeated conditions of a life, which is what lifestyle medicine concerns itself with.
Practical step: keep your sense of smell in regular use through cooking, plants and varied environments.
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